Pottery is made of clay without kaolin. Kaolin is essential to making porcelain (china), but is not essential nor is it used in making pottery. Pottery is an earthenware and very different in structure from porcelain. Pottery is hardened by heat and is made of a mixture of coarse clay, which produces the rough texture from which it gets its common name. Basically, pottery is a pliable earthen clay, not containing kaolin, and is therefore easily molded, shaped, fired, and hardened for commercial use. The epoxy-resinous composition described herein looks like and hardens to the rough consistency of pottery and may be used for filling and mending missing pieces, as well as for producing a bisque finish or structural coating. The composition described herein is excellent for restoring and finishing soft paste pottery referred to as faience or majolica.
A great need exists for a mending and restoring material externally identical or interchangeable with pottery and similar ceramics such as faience, majolica, soft paste ware, which requires no kiln or firing and which is hardenable thermo-genetically, air-drying, and self-curing, and which may be applied with a brush or by hand. Such material is essentially useful for pottery repair and coating finishes stone-like in nature, and as a coating material to fashion identical finishes over broken areas of an existing pottery or ceramic article. The material should harden without being subjected to high temperatures and could be used with considerable convenience and efficiency to repair or modify ceramics, pottery, decorated by paint or otherwise and materials which would normally be destroyed by subjection to high temperatures or re-firing. The material desirably could exhibit a small coefficient of expansion, matching that of pottery. The material composition desirably could withstand high temperatures to which a chinalike object may be subjected in use, such as when being cleaned in a dishwasher. Once cured, the material should be impervious to hot or cold water, acids, stains, saline solutions and the like.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a material which is capable, without firing, of hardening into a hard and pottery-like coating substance.
It is an object of this invention to provide a conveniently hardenable coating compound which is sufficiently strong and exhibits the lustrous or the bisque finish or stoneware ceramics and pottery.
It is similarly an object of this invention to provide a composition which sets to a structurally hard coating, mortar-like in its consistency and adhesiveness, which may be substantially externally indistinguishable from the ceramic to which it is applied.
It is another object of this invention to provide a coating compound which hardens to a rigid bond substantially impervious to water and to changes of temperature.
It is another object of this invention to provide a ceramic coating or mortar which is thermogenetic, and which hardens without heating or baking, fairly rapidly.
It is similarly an object of this invention to provide a composition which can be mixed with oil base paints to enable a ceramist or china-mender to simulate and restore the ceramic article he is mending, in such a manner that the bisque or stoneware surface of the article is restored to perfection and the damage is invisibilised.
It is another object of this invention to provide an adhesive structural pottery-like coating composition which readily hardens at room temperatures.
It is another object of this invention to provide a coating composition having a low coefficient of expansion similar to that of pottery or stoneware.
It is another object of this invention to provide materials for the repair, modification and resurfacing of pottery and the like without heating of any kind and without high temperature treatment.